I APOLOGIA PRO FIDE MEA INTRODUCTORY 1907 "I never parted with any belief till I had found its complement; nor did I ever look back with antipathy or contempt on the beliefs which I had long outgrown. I have at no time of my life lost faith in a supreme Providence, in an immortal soul, and in spiritual life; but I came to find these much nearer to me on earth than I had imagined, much more real, more vivid, and more practical. Superhuman hopes and ecstasies have slowly taken form in my mind as practical duties and indomitable convictions of a good that is to be." THESE words were written in 1890 and published in New York in a short paper that I had been requested to send to explain to Americans the growth of my opinions, and I reprinted them in my recent collections of Memories and Thoughts, 1906. I have been continually pressed, in public and in private, to explain the meaning of these words; to give a more detailed account of this gradual unfolding of thought, to show how superhuman hopes can materialise, so to speak, in practical duties. I have no right to refuse these appeals; nor can I honestly screen my natural aversion to enter a sort of public confessional by the plea that it concerns nobody but myself. It is known that now for some forty years past I have from time to time written and spoken in public on the burning questions of theology and competing systems of religion; that I have been the outspoken critic of some accepted forms of belief and, I hope I may claim to be, the unshrinking follower of a new belief. For a whole generation I have found myself forced to act as the mouthpiece of this new belief and as the guide of those who have lived and died in it. All this, as I shall presently show, was thrust on me as a social and personal duty, against my own inclinations and design, by a sense of loyalty to my friends and comrades. I cannot now divest myself of a responsibility which I never sought and for which I felt myself wholly unfit. But as, in public and in private, many persons, in good faith and with a serious purpose, challenge me to state, in plain words, What do I believe? How did this belief form in my mind? How does it enable me to live and to prepare for death? -I will try to tell my simple story of conversion and conviction, as humbly and as truthfully as I can find words to utter it, and with as little of the personal colour which is inevitable in so ungrateful a task. There is nothing, I know, in any way sensational, spasmodic, or original in this plain tale, and in these days it is too likely to be looked on as dull, stale, commonplace, and so forth. How can there be anything at all exciting about so regular and calm a development of thought? But the story of how spiritual rest might be achieved may prove useful to some "perturbed spirit" in our troubled times. On my grave-stone or rather on my urn I would have inscribed He found peace. And the device of this little memoir may be to adapt a famous motto of Alfred de Vigny"un idéal de jeunesse réalisé dans l'âge mûr.” Many of the most eminent thinkers of the nineteenth century who have based life on non-theological or Agnostic principles such as Bentham, George Grote, the two Mills, the two Martineaus, Herbert Spencer, Thomas Huxley, J. Tyndall, George H. Lewes, George Eliot were not bred in the Anglican communion, perhaps never understood and certainly never shared in the spiritual associations of a sacerdotal church. It happens to have been my lot to have been born and bred in such a church, to have been saturated as a student with orthodox theology, to have had till full manhood a heartwhole attachment to the sacerdotal ritual and a reasoned faith in the Christian creeds; and then, by very gradual and regular transitions, to have settled down in middle age into that Positive Religion-wherein I find, as my life closes round me in old age, such perfect peace, such joyful anticipations of a life to come. All my training, all my sympathies and tastes down to full age, were with that form of worship and of faith which has its traditional root in Oxford. My teachers at school and at college were almost all English clergymen. Nearly all the men with whom I have worked as colleagues in the Positive Propaganda had an orthodox training in the Universities, and many were born and bred in clerical or in official homes. Along with these, most of them now no more, I have passed through all the typical phases of religious thought, from effusive Ritualism to Broad Church, to Latitudinarianism, Unitarianism, Theism, and finally to the Faith in Humanity in which I rest. I am told that I am bound to explain to those whom I have assumed to address, the occasions and the mode in which so radical a set of changes came about. This I will try to do as frankly as I can, trusting not to offend any genuine belief by the mode of telling. I can |